Spinoza & Melville (reposting for Ralph Dumain)
himnarestro
my moderatorial duties. As a result, I approved the following post of
Ralph's after it was already 30 days old (which means too old to reply
to), so I'm copying it to this new thread so you may reply if you wish:
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Ralph Dumain wrote, on July 6 (and reposted on July 11):
Several times over the years I've seen Clare Spark bring up the topic
of Spinoza, without any ensuing resolution or coherent discussion of
the topic. As it happens, I've been reading a lot about Spinoza
lately--he seems to be all the rage these days. I've now plowed
through a substantial portion of Willi Goetschel's Spinoza's Modernity:
Mendelssohn, Lessing, and Heine--tough to read, but apparently very
important. I rapidly skimmed the first hundred some pages of Rebecca
Goldstein's _Betraying Spinoza_, but it's premature to comment, as no
clear assertions about Spinoza's
Jewishness--the theme of the book--have yet emerged. I've got a lot of
other stuff lined up. But now I'm wondering about the Melville-Spinoza
nexus, which is alleged to be important, but eludes me.
BTW, I've also re-read Heine's THE ROMANTIC SCHOOL and RELIGION AND
PHILOSOPHY IN GERMANY, and marvel again at his insight.
I'm totally out of the Melville loop , and can't even remember what
I've read, but I'll adduce a few fragments. Some years ago I read at
least one journal article on the subject, but I can't remember what it
was. And I have this reference at hand:
****************
TI: Melville and Spinoza.
AU: HART,-ALAN
SO: Studia-Spinozana. 1989; 5: 43-58
AB: Herman Melville purchased an edition of Bayle's Dictionary in 1849.
It contains Bayle's version of Spinoza's philosophy. Melville refers to
Spinoza in Moby Dick and echoes of Bayle's interpretation can be found
there and in Billy Budd.
*******************
Some years ago I brought up Pochmann. Here is a relevant extract:
---------------------------------------------
258. After coming to another impasse in Pierre, Melville shrank within
himself. While he continued, as Hawthorne observed, to wander to and
fro in the "dismal and monotonous" metaphysical regions, and on
occasions to regale his friends and visitors with philosophical
monologues in the Coleridgean manner, his will to believe appears to
have effected at least a partial triumph by the time he wrote Clarel
(1876), in which he heaps scorn upon Jewish Margoth, a shallow
scientist, who, in his insensibility to
spiritual values, declares that "All's mere geology," while an ass
brays confirmation (Clarel, I, 350; see also p. 329; Julian Hawthorne,
op. cit., II, 135; Braswell, op. cit., pp. 108, 110-20; and Weaver,
Melville, pp. 16, 351). At all events, when, during the last year of
his life, he wrote Billy Budd, he penned what has been called his
"testament of acceptance." See E. L. G. Watson, "Melville's Testament
of Acceptance," New Engl. Quar., VI (June, 1933), 31927. The daemonic
titanism of Ahab has given way before a
sense of resignation to the inscrutable laws of the universe and
acquiescence in the wisdom of God that remains still past man's finding
out, but that is no longer hateful. In what degree this change of heart
is attributable to the growing influence upon him of the Christian
tradition, the mediating and humanizing experiencing of life and old
age, a
re-examination of and a pondering upon Kantian ethics, or other
influences is conjectural.
What can be asserted with fair assurance is that his heaping of abuse
upon the "new Apostles . . . muttering Kantian categories through teeth
and lips dry and dusty as any miller's, with the crumbs of Graham
crackers" (Pierre, p. 418) proceeds less from any dissatisfaction with
Kant than from the persistence of certain "reconcilers" of the
"Optimist" or "Compensation" school (ibid., p. 385)that is,
philosophers who pretend to have found the talismanic secret. The group
includes all those from Plato and Spinoza to Goethe and Emerson "and
many more" who belong to "this guild of self-impostors," together with
"a preposterous rabble of Muggletonian Scots and Yankees, whose vile
brogue still the more bespeaks the stripedness of their Greek and
German Neoplatonic originals" (ibid., p. 290). It is noteworthy that
Kant is never mentioned in this company. He probably had in mind men
like Fichte, Schelling, and Schleiermacher among the Germans, and
Carlyle and Emerson among Scotch and Yankee disciples. The
transcendentalist philosopher Plotinus Plinlimnon in Pierre, the
spineless Rev. Mr. Falsgrave in the same book, and the chaplain in
White-Jacket, who is genial, well bred, and learned in Plato and in the
German philosophers, but who preaches sermons wholly unsuited to the
crew these are not attacks on Kant but on false disciples and
[Notes to Page 439 759] traducers of honest divers after the truth like
Kant. But even Emerson, whose optimism Melville could not stomach, and
whose reputation for
expounding unintelligible "transcendentalisms, myths and oracular
gibberish" had predisposed Melville to question his sincerity even this
Emerson, granted that he be a humbug, seemed to Melville "no common
humbug". For the sake of argument (he wrote to Evert Duyckinck) let us
call Emerson a fool: "Then had I rather be a fool than a wise man. I
love all men who dive. Any fish can swim near the surface, but it takes
a great whale to go down stairs five miles or more He does not credit
Emerson precisely with this ability, but he improves the occasion to
honor "the whole corps of thought-divers, that have been diving and
coming up again with blood-shot eyes since the world began." (See
Thorp, op. cit., pp. 371-72). For Melville, Kant was one of those
thought-divers, and there is not an instance among the dozens of
passages that belittle his disciples of all kinds which impugns Kant's
sincerity or depreciates his philosophic abilities, The passage in
Moby-Dick (II, 59), in which Melville recommends that Ahab, rather than
balance Locke against Kant, throw both overboard if he wishes the
Pequod to "float light and right," is not so much a condemnation of
either Locke or Kant, or both, as an expression of discontent with all
philosophy. It is of the same order as Emerson's asking, "Who has not
looked into a metaphysical book? And what sensible man ever looked
twice?"Works, II, 438.
_______________
.... Following an argument in Clarel (II, 12-13) turning upon the
Christian concept of Heaven as a haven for the oppressed, the theme of
love as presented in the Sermon on the Mount, and evil in human nature,
Melville remarks: "We've touched a theme! From which the club and
lyceum swerve, / Nor Herr von Goethe would esteem." Here is reflected
the popular American conception of Goethe as a worldly, hedonistic
pagan, characterized by Pierre as a "gold-laced virtuoso" and an
"inconceivable coxcomb" (Pierre, pp. 421-22; but see Moby-Dick, II,
119). Goethe's claim that he found the "Talismanic Secret" but proves
Goethe a pretentious quack who belongs, with Plato and Spinoza, to the
"guild of self-imposters" (Pierre, p. 290). [p. 760] Hateful as he
found Goethe's "pantheism," he found even more detestable his optimism:
"Goethe's 'Live in the all"' leads him to expostulate, "What
nonesense!" Yet he added this postscript: "This 'all' feeling, though,
there is some truth in it. You must often have felt it, lying on the
grass on a warm summer's day. Your legs seem to send out shoots into
the earth.... This is the all feeling. But what plays the mischief with
the truth is that men will insist upon the universal application of a
temporary feeling or opinion."Julian Hawthorne, op. cit., I, 406. Here
speaks Melville the intellectual skeptic who has come to see truth as
so partial or many-sided that he regards the assertion of its
pretensions and even the search for it ridiculous.
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Here are some cites from the ms of a remarkable book by Loren Goldner
on Melville:
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". . . Clarel is a remarkable document of the Western Zeitgeist in the
period between the end of idealism, on both sides of the Atlantic,
after 1848, and the beginning of international modernism ca. 1890.
Melville's involvement with anthropology, philosophy and history always
made him something of a writer of ideas, and in Clarel he offers a
unique radioscopy of the Western intellectual and cultural world of the
1870's, published, perhaps not accidentally, in the same year when even
Friedrich Nietzsche was passing through his most "positivist" period
[779] . It is Melville's discussion, through various characters, of
19th-century Protestant theology, the Catholic Church, scientific
materialism, the tottering Ottoman empire, Darwin, geology, positivism,
socialism, communism and class war, which makes Clarel a tour d'horizon
worthy of illuminating to what point Melville's earlier problematic had
come."
". . . the extreme positivist viewpoint represented by the Jewish
geologist Margoth. Margoth was "a Jew-- German, I deem--but
readvised--an Israelite, say, Hegelized--Convert to science, for but
see the hammer: yes, geology.". (II.xix. 53-57)
As a "Hegelized" Israelite, Margoth was a figure in the tradition of
19th century German-Jewish thinkers such as Moses Mendelsohn, who
transformed Judaism into something much closer to philosophy, much as
David Friedrich Strauss did for Protestantism. But Margoth goes much
farther, being in fact more of a vulgar materialist, (like Turgenev's
Bazarov in Fathers and Sons) or the Moleschottian materialists of the
1850's. Margoth's science has completely secularized the "sacred
geography" through which the pilgrims are travelling . . . ."
"The appearance of the ultra-positivist figure of Margoth prompts a
debate over secularizing trends in Judaism of real scope. The group
wonders if Margoth's scientism is not a direct expression of his
Jewishness, and turns to Anglican priest Derwent for clarification, but
Derwent insists that only "preconceptions" lie beneath such a
connection . . . ."
""More than one bold freethinking Jew" is creating trouble for the
rabbis. Rolfe mentions Uriel Acosta [800] , Heine, and the Alexandrian
Jewish neo-Platonists who "Sharing some doubts we moderns rue/ Would
fain Eclectic comfort fold/ By grafting slips from Plato's palm/ On
Moses' melancholy yew" (II.xxii.79-83) and says that "we seek balm by
kindred graftings", as did the aforementioned Moses Mendelsohn. But all
these figures do not explain the vulgar scientific materialism of
Margoth, who is hardly a Spinozist: "...He, poor sheep astray, /The
Levitic cipher quite erased,/On what vile pig-weed hath he grazed./Not
his Spinoza's starry brow/(A non-conformer, ye'll allow),/A lion in
brain, in life a lamb,/Sinless recluse of Amsterdam;/....The erring
twain, Spinoza and poor Margoth here,/ Both Jews, which in dissent do
vary:/In these what parted poles appear--/The blind man and the
visionary.""
"But Melville is no more sanguine about Protestantism and Catholicism.
To discuss the Reformation, he lets a French Dominican priest voice an
analysis of the direct line from Luther to communism. The priest
presents himself as a "Catholic Democrat", which provokes an indulgent
smile from Derwent and incredulity from Rolfe. Derwent reminds the
Dominican of the "rot of Rome in Luther's time, the canker spot". But
the priest is a
modernist: . . . ."
"Rolfe has the final word, which sounds right out of Dostoevsky's
"Grand Inquisitor": .....
........../Rome and the Atheist have gained/These two shall fight it
out--these two;/Protestantism being retained/For base of operations
sly/By Atheism.""
"This survey of revolution, positivism and the compromises with
modernity of Judaism and various strands of Christianity gives a fair
initial indication of the ideological "desert", highlighted by the
desert of the Wandering Jew, in which Clarel unfolds. The more or less
relentless topography, echoing Melville's journal entries of twenty
years before, is the "external" manifestation of this spiritual
geography. Nothing could be farther from the cosmic imagination of
Melville in the South Seas [809] . The desert is, after all, the
birthplace of imageless monotheism. But when one looks more closely,
one sees that in fact Melville is commenting on the distance he has
traveled from his earlier period, in a constant undercurrent of
maritime references in dessicated desert settings, as well as reference
to the "primitive". It is as if he is consciously drawing
attention to the de-cosmized geographical context for the late
19th-century cultural desert he is crossing. Clarel is not Moby Dick,
and does not pose the "supercession" at least implied in Moby Dick. "
"How far Melville had evolved since the 1845-1851 period of his early
sea novels is underscored in two key characters, the Greek pilot,
Agath, and the Confederate veteran and half-Indian, Ungar. Their
stories and their outlooks make it perfectly clear that anything
associated with the primitive, as one might imagine from the Indian
imagery just quoted, has receded for Melville as any kind of
alternative. "
"These thoughts are presented in the context of a broader consideration
of the impact of science which has already been treated. What Melville
is driving at here is the idea that the modern Christianity (with Jesus
"the indulgent God") which no longer insists on radical evil as a force
to be combatted may be handing the world over to evil in the form of
"dismission civil". Although Transcendentalism, having in the interim
receded in the
crass materialism of the post-Civil War period, is no longer an issue
in Clarel, Melville is continuing the same polemic against what is left
of institutional religion in the age of Strauss [831] and Renan [832] .
"
"But all of these themes are, as it were, prelude, to the remarkable
medievalism and the presence of the Knights Templar in Clarel, a
presence so pervasive that it can hardly be called a leitmotiv, as it
was in some of Melville's earlier works."
"The theme of the pseudo-sacred has been central to the entire analysis
of Melville presented in this study. Its essential meaning is presented
in the "standing of mast-heads" passage of Moby Dick, where neither
Washington nor Napoleon nor Nelson will "answer a single hail from
below, however madly invoked", with the Vendome tower as its concrete
embodiment for Melville and for Marx. This deflation of modern
charismatic figures is called the "pseudo-sacred" because, like the
Western religions compromised with rationality discussed in Clarel,
they must necessarily stand in contrast to the "sacred", cosmic
kingship, in societies where cosmos has not yet been severed from
mythos, the necessary presupposition for the "pharoah with the
feet of clay", the Napoleons and the Louis Napoleons. Melville, as was
pointed out in the analyses of Redburn and Pierre ,experienced the
pseudo-sacred first of all in his own estrangement from the American
Revolutionary tradition of his heroic grandfathers, then in his father
the importer of French luxury goods, and thereafter proceeded to
analyze it forwards and backwards with world-historical sweep. The
archetype of the
sacred, for the Melville of Moby Dick, was ancient Egypt [842] , and
the prototype for cosmic kingship, in the more directly European
tradition, was Charlemagne, who last appeared, in fragments, in The
Confidence Man. All of these figures, it was argued, were exaggerated
father imagos for Melville, against whom he hoped to form a positive
self in rebellion, given the drastic failure of his real relationship
to his own father. Further, it has been shown that these "fathers", the
Charlemagnes, often blended into
buildings, monuments and mountains, such as the pyramids in Moby Dick,
the Mount of the Titans in Pierre, Petra and the New York Tombs in
"Bartleby", and Mt. Greylock in Israel Potter and "The Piazza". But in
Clarel, Napoleon, the paradigm of the pseudo-sacred, is absent, and
Charlemagne as such has receded to a trace, whose coronation is
recalled by the outcast Wandering Jew. So has the estrangement from the
revolutionary era of the 18th century, as the latter had also receded.
In turning away from the novel, and the problem of the character, for
poetry, Melville had come to
the end of Pierre's Titanism, so to speak; defeated in the public
sphere of literature, he withdrew into 35 years of quiet but by no
means second-rate work, including Clarel . The times had become far
more extreme, as Melville portrays them through his major protagonists;
Transcendentalism as an enemy was nothing compared to the spiritual
desert of the 1870's, created (in Melville's terms) by science,
positivism, tepid rationalist theologies and the revolutionary threat,
a dissolution which Melville traced historically from Luther, Galileo,
Voltaire and even further back from Alexandrian
Jewish neo-Platonism. A world view that did not acknowledge radical
evil was, for Melville, bankrupt; when the Transcendentalists faded
away, Melville warred with the even more dangerous (to his view)
palliatives that replaced them. Melville in Clarel is more detached
from his protagonists than he had been in his novels; the distance from
Redburn, Ishmael or Pierre to Clarel also marks the distance Melville
had travelled from any earlier "Titanism". He lets important figures
such as Rolfe, Vine, Ungar and Mortmain articulate parts of his own
views, and at other times expresses himself through his unidentified
narrator. Father associations with buildings, monuments and mountains
from earlier works have been transformed in Clarel into fragments, that
is into stones [843] . This does not mean that Melville has succeeded
in the revolt signaled in Pierre; it merely means he has transposed the
terms, and that he does not negate any more."
"Into the void left by the crumbling of Melville's heroes of negation,
collective or individual, moves the late Melville's initially startling
medievalism. The pseudo-sacred for Pierre was the memory of his famous
grandfather, the general; in Clarel, the pseudo-sacred is a faded
tattoo of a Jerusalem cross on the arm of an old sailor who acquired it
in a distracted moment in the South Seas. The partly-favorable portrait
of Roman Catholicism in Clarel is not that of a potential convert ;
Melville's
preoccupation with radical evil left him in the orbit of Calvinism to
the end. One might associate the new consideration for Catholicism
(largely unmentioned in his earlier works [847] ) with a general
post-1850 mood among certain Anglophone intellectuals and artists such
as the pre-Raphaelites, the Oxford movement, or Gerard Manley Hopkins,
or even the softening of a Mathew Arnold toward the Church, in which
the backlash [848] against the extreme barren cultural climate
described in Clarel made the Church more respectable than it had been
in the era of militant Enlightenment and the unabashed positivism and
utilitarianism [849] that succeeded it. But the problem goes much
deeper than that. Once Melville had settled his accounts with negation
[850] , and his analysis of the pseudo-sacred, his problematic led him
to a post-Enlightenment view of Western history, if indeed the
protagonist of the "antemosaic cosmic man" in Moby Dick was any closer
to the Enlightenment."
"In Clarel, Melville laid to rest every shibboleth of the modern 19th
century world: science, positivism, liberal theology, and revolution.
The book ends with Clarel saying "They wire the world-- Far under
sea/They talk; but never comes to me/A message from beneath the stone."
That was in all likelihood Melville's own attitude, pretty much as
Hawthorne had described him 20 years earlier. The working class had
become for him nothing more than a red spectre on the horizon, in
contrast to the vivid detail on class and labor with which he filled
his early books of the sea. In the deepening pessimism that drew him to
Schopenhauer and Buddhism, he withdrew more and more into his own
thought world. The sweep of Clarel, however, is as vast as that of Moby
Dick, in that Melville shows an awareness of a remarkable array of
intellectual, scientific, and religious currents afoot in the third
quarter of the nineteenth century."
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From all of this, and what I remember of Clare's comments, the
relevant ideological factors involved seem to be:
(1) pantheism,
(2) Jewishness,
(3) optimism and pessimism
(4) (scientific) rationality and the knowability of reality
(5) man's place in Nature or the totality of existence
(6) monism vs. dualism.
Some years ago, in reaction to Pochmann, I wrote my impression:
>[there is something] cantankerous in Melville's aversion to German
>metaphysics--not because of any specific objectionable content he
>perceives in it--but because he is averse to its seeming pretensions, in
>conflict with Melville's bitter, pessimistic inclination to maintain that
>reality is unknowable.
I haven't tracked down Melville's references to Spinoza beyond what you
see here in these secondary sources. Perhaps someone else can supply
the missing info. It seems that Melville's 'engagement' with Spinoza
was skin-deep at best. Secondly, I wonder if he really grappled with
Spinoza directly or just filtered him through (German) Romanticism,
which was enamored with Spinoza's alleged pantheism without necessarily
embracing his crypto-materialism or political radicalism. From these
commentaries above Melville comes off as a cranky, disillusioned
reactionary, suspicious of progress, levelling tendencies, the
rationalist disenchantment of the
world. Not _all_ such reactionaries are historically
anti-Semites--Nietzsche was not, although he was a reactionary scumbag
of the lowest stripe--but here the Jewish connection arouses suspicion
as the embodiment of hated liberalizing rationalizing desacralizing
levelling modernizing tendencies . Yet in Moby Dick Melville exhibits
demystifying tendencies of a potentially materialist sort, even while
vitalistically skeptical of the positivist direction of modern thought,
not to mention an enquiring spirit and a radical democratic
sensibility. Melville certainly had his antenna up for all of the
inner tensions and ideological tendencies of his age, but as an
autodidactic bricoleur, and as an artist rather than philosopher, he
may not have mustered the methodological discipline to think through
the philosophies he ransacked, but reacted according to what he sensed
in them. I could use some clarification, whether it be Clareification
or Somebodyelseification.